Thursday, March 30, 2006

All librarians should have a love/hate relationship with their online catalog. For all the time and effort librarians put into maintaining their online catalogs, you might think the interfaces would be a lot more user-friendly. (How often does Amazon.com have to do training sessions on "Finding Books"?) The only real course of action is for librarians to lament the sorry state of their catalogs' interfaces to one another -- informally, in meetings, at conferences, with users' groups, and on listservs. In the meantime, just be sure you keep paying your catalog vendors outrageous fees for their substandard products.

Oh yeah. I defy anyone to find a worse online catalog than ours, though the state spent millions of dollars. How much does it suck? Well, if you type in a search, look at your results, and decide to go back and revise your search, you will find that the terms you entered have disappeared. Feel free to enter them again. Over and over.

I'm sorry: ever tried to eliminate audiobooks from your Amazon results? Or ask it to, pretty please, show me only things that I can freaking buy? With Visa as my witness, I love Amazon as much as anybody, but holding it, or Google, up as the ultimate searching/interface experience is just silly.